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Huzzah! An Updated Website!
I was lucky enough to pick up a good batch of 1940s, 1950s and 1960s Mister Oswald tearsheets. Tearsheets are the printed magazine pages and they are not all that common. Most hardware stores would throw the magazine out after they were done with it. During WWII, many of them went to the war effort. So after scanning dozens of these tearsheets, I decided to rework the structure of the website. You’ll now find a number of sub-menus under “Mister Oswald” in the Gallery menu. I’ve broken the strips down into decades for easier viewing. They are also presented in chronological order. Finally, I’ve added a sub-menu featuring Mister Oswald…
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Taking Care of Business with Dan Tratensek Podcast!
As you all know, Mister Oswald spent his career in the pages of Hardware Retailing magazine, though it was titled Hardware Retailer in the early days of the strip. Dan Tratensek is the publisher of Hardware Retailing, and it was a great honor and pleasure to sit down with Dan for his podcast, Taking Care of Business with Dan Tratensek. The podcast focuses on the hardware industry, but Dan wanted to give his listeners a peek into the lighter side of things, with a wonderful 30 minute discussion about our favorite comic strip hardware retailer. I hope you enjoy the podcast as much as I did being a part of…
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I Heard Harry Caray’s Voice
As described in my first blog post on the site, I discovered Russ Johnson’s work in 1993 when I ran across a copy of his 1968 book, Forty Years with Mister Oswald, in a used bookstore in Illinois. Two years later I was chatting on the phone with Don Petterson, a collector friend in Vermont, who let me know that Russ was alive and well in Gibson City, Illinois. Don had first gotten in touch with Russ in 1979 after reading an article about Russ and Mister Oswald, written by Max Allan Collins for the old Comics Buyers Guide. Don ordered a copy of the book directly from Russ ($4.95…
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It Started with a Book
This very book, in fact: I was antiquing in Galena, Illinois in 1993 when I ran across a used bookstore. Now I had a thing for used bookstores, especially in the pre-and-early internet days. My father was a voracious reader and once a month or so we would head to the Cranbury Bookworm, a wonderful old used bookstore in Cranbury, New Jersey. It was a large three-story establishment, housed in an 1800s white clapboard house. And it had that used bookstore smell. Slightly musty, the air filled with the scent of aging paper. I loved it. Whenever I traveled, I would look for used bookstores, looking for books by some…
The Life and Times of Russ Johnson and Mister Oswald